Phydeaux
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ORIGINAL: njlauren
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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
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ORIGINAL: GotSteel
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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
But the statement "Evolution is a fact. That is settled science" is simply never true.
The National Academy of Science disagrees with you:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6024&page=28
"Scientists most often use the word "fact" to describe an observation. But scientists can also use fact to mean something that has been tested or observed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing or looking for examples. The occurrence of evolution in this sense is fact. Scientists no longer question whether descent with modification occurred because the evidence is so strong."
And yet the very first line of your quote says evolution is a theory.
The oxford dictionary, fortunately removed from the perview of the National Academies, says nothing about the national academies definition.
fact: a thing that is known or proved to be true:
Since a theory is never proven, (only supported) it ergo cannot be a fact.
Looking in the miriam webster definition of "theory" we find:
the·o·ry
noun \ˈthē-ə-rē, ˈthir-ē\
: an idea or set of ideas that is intended to explain facts or events
Since you may not define an object in terms of itself (tautological) it seems that indeed, a fact is not a theory.
A quick perusal finds no other cases where the NAS calls a theory a fact. For example the theory of gravity is, wait for it: a theory.
So it seems that in our zeal to proclaim evolution a fact that the national acadmies makes a special exception for the word fact. Thereby removing themselves from the debate.
Gravity is accepted as fact, even though it is a 'theory'. Gravity, like evolution, has gaps in understanding, as there is with all the fields that make up the forces in the universe, but the idea of gravity is accepted fact, no one is saying that gravity is caused by an intelligent designer or anything like that. It is the same way that in normal space and time, the speed of light as an absolute barrier is accepted fact by science. The difference with science, unlike religion, is that 'commonly accepted fact' is open to challenge, and if someone comes up with proof that the speed of light is somehow not a 'speed limit', that can be validated (and please, don't do a google search and come up with stuff from last year, where fermilab experimenters seemed to have shown neutrinos going faster than light; turned out to be experimental error), then accepted fact will change.
Put it this way, Newton's laws of physics are still accepted fact, and unless you are working somewhere in the 99% of C (speed of light), they are true, as are Maxwell's equations. Usually when things are accepted as fact, when they get modified, it is in the details, not the overarching view of it. Evolution is much like that, the overall framework is accepted as fact, what is open, still changing, is the details.
There are many branches of ID, but they generally boil down to two schools, one of which that has more possibilities than another:
1)Evolution never happened, the earth was created as it is exists today, what we see in the Fossil record is God playing tricks on us, testing our faith, Dinosaurs lived in the garden of Eden (they were vegetarian *lol*), you name it...which frankly is the delusions of morons clinging to bronze age myth as 'fact', and coming up with more and more outrageous sylogisms to try and bolster it.
2)Those who say evolution in fact has gone on, the earth is not 6000 years old, etc, but that the whole process is guided by an 'intelligent designer', that the idea of random mutations leading to survival of the fittest cannot explain how evolution for example, chose man to be the top of the pyramid.
That at least has some potential, the problem is that the ID people who support this are doing so from the prospective of assuming it is true, and manipulating evidence to try and make it appear that only an intelligent designer created things..they don't approach it as scientists..and trying to teach ID as it now stands as science is ludicrous, because it starts with the assumption ID is true, fact, which science does not. When the two chemists came up with cold fusion, other scientists didn't say "it must be true" (well, okay, other than fellow chemists, who were busy blowing raspberries at physicists), they took the results the two published, and checked it..and showed pretty quickly that what they achieved was badly done experiments, not reality. A guy in princeton claimed that electrons had lower energy states that currently known, and claimed he could generate unlimited power from his so called 'blue light technology'...and it failed, miserably.
There is nothing wrong with hypothesizing that evolution was guided by an intelligent designer of some sort, but you don't take a hypothesis, claim it is true, and cherry pick things to show it is true, you come up with ways to test the theory, run the tests, and see what they show. Saying "an eyeball couldn't happen from random chance", ie irreducibile complexity, fails, because irreducible complexity itself is a conjecture, because no one has proven that anything in nature couldn't happen by random chance, they are using as proof a conjecture that itself hasn't been proven.
Science doesn't use the term 'fact' much, because science has the view that there is always room for questions, but that doesn't mean that science doesn't accept certain things as fact, because there has been nothing to show that is false. ID is religion, because it starts off assuming something is true, and while it claims to use the framework of science, it does what religion does with scripture, it 'interprets' facts that bolster what they say is truth, rather than analyze what they have and see if their conclusion fits what is there, big difference. Those who cite the bible on homosexuality as fact are guilty of that, or claiming literal truth to the words in the bible, because it ignores the facts around the bible, context, origins, etc.....religion proclaims "truth", as with Catholic teaching or biblical literalness, but unlike science, there isn't the idea that if something comes along that casts it in doubt, religion wants to bury those who challenge it, or poke their eyes out, torture them, until they get the result they want.
As I said I have no problem with the theory of evolution. Like gravity, the speed of light etc, I also accept it as a given until such time as something else explains the data points better.
I have a huge problem with the National Academies Press injecting politics into science and calling evolution (and evolution alone apparently) fact.
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RE: End ABSTINANCE "education"! ( Since it'... - 
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